Cpt. Obvious

Yea, Emacs is way to simple and limited to be effective. There's only a little more than 10,000 commands, but fortunately it supports macros and some limited scripting so it's possible to use it for some limited editing... Seriously, it's has a learning curve steeper than most programming languages. Personally I feel you shouldn't spend more time learning to use the editor than programming...

The mere thought that Vampires might exist in those books throws science out the window. If we are to accept that vampires are real, then we have to accept that there is some "magic" at work and that we doesn't know how it works. Why blood? Why the blood of sentients, or human blood, or in some versions only the blood of virgin humans? To be able to read a story involving vampires we have to ignore all of these things, so what makes it so hard to accept the idea that you could give blood orally to a woman pregnant with a vampire baby when we doesn't even know why they need blood in the first place? Yes it's stupid, but it's only marginally more stupid than the entire genre as a whole. Now I can't really comment on the Twilight books as I've never read them and all I know about them comes from internet haters, most of who I suspect never read them either.

First time meeting an immortal... I think walking through the table wasn't helping. Apart from the "space whale" this is the first supernatural being he has met, and having her walk though the table probably had him thinking about ghosts and spirits, maybe even vampires rather than immortals at first.

I'm pretty sure I don't want my toast quite that toasty...

Hadn't heard about the diamond coated wire. That article talks about using it in processors so I think it will conduct, but it's not for bonding chips but rather for connecting individual components on the chip. Compared to the internal signals on a chip the external signals are quite "crude", using relatively high voltages and currents.

You can make thinner wires out of gold, but as gold isn't as good a conductor they have to be thicker than the equivalent copper wire. And thicker means more expensive, so unless corrosion resistance is very important, or it needs to withstand a lot of vibrations copper is often the preferred material. For common components vibration is not a problem, thermal expansion can be a problem, but in low power electronics it's not a big problem and copper is usually good enough.

I wasn't talking about the visible parts of the chips. It used to be that all integrated circuits used gold wire to connect the chip to the external connections on the packaging. Here is a picture showing what I mean. I have however looked around a bit and apparently copper is often used now, and for low power and cheap circuits they can even use aluminium. Old processors using a Pin Grid Array package had pins made of gold. These were soft and prone to bend when inserted into the sockets, but didn't usually break unless you wiggled them around. Later versions moved to Ball Grid Array, and on these the contact surfaces are gold plated. The "pins" in the socket are made of a bronze alloy which is also gold plated. Gold is used because it doesn't corrode, it's soft and malleable and a decent conductor.

I looked around a bit and it turns out that you are correct. Gold was the material of choice a few years back, but for a lot of circuits they are not using copper and for the cheapest possible even aluminium. Gold remains the choice for high power and high reliability solutions. Copper is actually a slightly better conductor and the bond wires can be made even thinner than with gold, but it's also more likely to break due to metal fatigue. Gold has a weakness in that if bonded to an aluminium surface it may develop something called "purple plague". This is a intermetallic compound of aluminium and gold that's a bad conductor and mechanically weak. This occurs when the joint is heated to more than 650°C. At lower temperatures in the range of 400-450°C other compounds can form.

I think you misunderstand what they are talking about here. The IHS that they write about is the Integrated Heat Spreader, and Intel has used solder or a TIM back and forth ever since they started using these. So Intel not soldering the IHS on a series is nothing remarkable. The core however is, and has always been, soldered. Further more even the cheapest chip will be bonded using gold wires. There is simply no material able to replace gold for this.

It's a well known fact that cats tend to assume the shape of their container. Some go as far as claiming that cats are a liquid, and the evidence can look quite convincing. Given these properties all you need is a container shaped as a standing cat and a feline willing to sleep in it. Unfortunately this seems to be a rare combination so the best approximation I've found is this.

Thank you! Well, that's hardly a cosmetic change? Thought (yea, rare enough for me): The size change spells (and the TF-gun) must have a secondary effect in that people who are transformed doesn't seem to have any problem adapting to a different center of gravity or a change in the length in the limbs... Not really of interest for this discussion, but the novelty of having an idea made me pause to type this up.

Rhoda is the size queen... (That sounds so wrong all of a sudden...) Shorter, longer, fatter, skinnier, resize the clothes or not, resize part of someone or something, and she's able to change the size more than any of the other cast members who can do this. So resizing is her primary talent or theme if you like. Other things such as changing hair color isn't her primary forte (someone please remind me where we learned she could do that, my memory fails me). I'm not certain in what way her cosmetic capabilities are second to the beams Ellen use. Perhaps the effect wears off quicker, perhaps she can only change hair color to something that occurs naturally while Ellen can make it glow-in-the-dark plaid. Who knows...

Magic! That might explain that 5.51 second run in Dragster...

That was so bad I flounder, not sure just what to say...

This... Or they could be a bit underhanded and have one of their researchers work as his assistant to keep track of his research. This last is a bit risky though. As it is he is the Golden Goose, and if they are smart they will try to keep from rocking the boat and risk Tedd telling them to go pound sand.

I have absolutely no idea how to respond to a question like that. I'm pretty sure there is not one single answer that covers all situations and individuals. What I do know is that there are other forms of dysphoria, though they are not as often mentioned. For instance there are people who have a deeply set feeling that they have the wrong number of limbs. Some has even had perfectly working limbs amputated in order to make their body match their mind, though it takes a lot to convince a doctor to amputate a leg or an arm when there is no conventional medicinal reason to do it. Given things like that happens I'm pretty sure there are people suffering from race dysphoria, but I have no idea how common it might be. If you can imagine it there is a good chance someone somewhere can identify with it.

That's something you quite often has to do. Some players can take hours to decide on sleeping arrangements. We had one six hour session where all that was accomplished was a bit of hunting for provisions. It took ten minutes for them to bag a boar, and the rest of the time deciding if they would smoke, dry, salt or just cook the meat. That was one of the reasons we started using a "not quite realtime" system. If the players started to bog down a swift kick in the butt from the GM usually got things rolling again.

Well, in our group talk wasn't a free action, other than that you could spew an incredible amount of drivel in the time it took to swing a sword. But basically anything said between players was said by their characters, and that included pizza orders... I remember a cunningly laid out ambush that failed as the sneaky halfling that was hiding near the road suddenly shouted that he wanted extra garlic sauce with his pizza... So if the players stood around in a dungeon for too long it was quite possible a wandering monster might stumble on them instead of the other way around..

I used to make up some games to play with the players, though they never knew about it. One time I rolled a D20 behind the screen every minute, made some appropriate (or inappropriate in some cases) noises and jotted down the result on a pad behind the screen and calculated the running average. The players soon noticed about the time roll and that I was obviously taking detailed notes. Soon they started worrying about what was going on that they didn't know about. When some one eventually asked about it I just said that it was nothing to worry about, it probably wouldn't kill them. When they got a bit antsy I started making this roll openly, but I still didn't tell them anything about why, and for some strange reason this freaked them out even more. There's no pleasing some players...

You forget that the exact odds depends on if the roll was made openly or behind the GM screen...

Something like this? Edit: Oh and I think I know why it looks so clunky... I'm pretty sure Dan works at at least twice the resolution you see here. If you do it that way and then resample the image the text looks a lot better. Obviously I didn't think of that before posting this picture...

Let me try to summarize that for you: It's complicated! Not trying to make fun of your comment... OK, you caught me, I am making fun of your comment, but not because I disagree but because I agree, to a degree. People are complicated, and if you even hint at sex being involved the number of permutation's quickly approaches infinity as some people has several, not always easily compatible, leanings, and for some it changes over the years or sometimes months or weeks... So, it's complicated...

That would probably be me. But at least the first few times it would be purely for pervert reasons. The chance to find out what things might feel like to a girl would be just too good to pass up. And then there's the ability to have multiple orgasms... I'd certainly would investigate that most thoroughly! Other than playing with myself I don't think gender bending would be something I went for, but without the experience there's no way to really know.

OK, so am I the only one who finds the idea of Ellen V5 zapping Brownie a bit disturbing? I have no idea just what that would do to her, but it feels like that just might not be a great idea. The thing that might save this is Brownies seemingly unlimited capacity for sleep, and the Dunkel family's usual non reaction to anything weird.

Yes please! Catgirl Heidi and a big ball of catnip infused yarn!!!